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Kiwibank Limited has implemented the ACI “Proactive Risk Manager for Enterprise Risk” to deliver fraud prevention and detection, protecting its 700,000 customers from card fraud. The anti-card fraud solution that can be implemented quickly and can deliver fraud prevention and detection in the future. The “Proactive Risk Manager” gives the bank ability to provide effective fraud prevention and in a matter of months after implementation delivered the savings that had been predicted throughout the first year.

Intesa Sanpaolo is deploying a Gemalto contactless prepaid card specifically designed for tourists taking part in the celebrations for the 150th anniversary of Italy’s unification this year. The bank is issuing the cards through its service center Setefi. The “Carta Esperienza Italia 150” allows users to enjoy the speed and convenience of contactless payments in shops, as well as the security of EMV for conventional payments and online purchases. Visitors can easily travel in the city area, by loading dedicated offers from the Turin transport company (“Gruppo Torinese Trasporti”) onto their card. They can purchase the card at Intesa Sanpaolo branches, at Gruppo Torinese Trasporti outlets in Turin, as well as in touristic places (such as “Officine Grandi Riparazioni di Torino” and “Reggia della Venaria Reale”).

Alpine Card Service (ACS) and JCB International (JCBI) global payment brand have partnered on an acquiring license. With this, ACS will provide acquiring services to 1,900 merchants and 800 ATMs operated by SmartChoice Technologies while JCB cards will be phased in with these merchants and ATMs starting this fall. The partnership will also increase convenience to the 69 million JCB cardmembers traveling to Nepal.

U.S. Bank launched its Payment Plus tool, replacing traditional payment methods with cardless accounts that use dynamic credit adjustment, single use accounts or straight-through processing to pay vendor invoices. Operated on the Visa network, Payment Plus enhances payment efficiency by accommodating many transactions that have not been able to be put on purchasing cards, including transactions that need to be tracked against vendor contracts. Payment Plus requires little or no investment in technology infrastructure by the buyer. An organization’s payment processes can stay essentially the same, but instead of cutting a cheque, they send an electronic payment file to U.S. Bank, which then automates the payment and reconciliation process.

Visa signed agreements with Federal Bank allowing its Visa Debit cardholders to receive international remittances almost instantly. Federal Bank is the first bank in India to activate this solution with Visa. It will allow recipients to receive funds in near real-time, deposited directly onto cardholders’ Visa cards. This comes as a result of a major enhancement to the Visa network that enables Visa card accounts to receive funds in near real-time. The enhancement is expected to prompt a new generation of personal payment services on Visa cards – including mobile and cross-border remittances, electronic bill pay, and prepaid reloads. This allows Indians working in the UAE to visit any one of more than 90 branches of UAE Exchange, the leading exchange house in the UAE, where they simply use the Visa card payment service by providing the recipient’s Visa card number to initiate the funds transfer.

U.S. Bank is rolling out EMV chip cards to 20,000 FlexPerks Travel Rewards Visa cardholders this month, and to other Travel Rewards cardholders later in the year. The PIN-and-chip systems are already prevalent in Europe and elsewhere. The FlexPerks cards will also contain technology for additional payment systems by offering an RFID chip and the standard magnetic strip. The dual-interface smart cards are manufactured and personalized in the U.S. by Oberthur Technologies.

YESpay International received the “ACT Canada Gold International Innovation Award 2011” in the Payment category for its “EMBOSS” EMV Chip & PIN card payment service. The award was issued at the Cardware Conference in Niagara, Canada. Through this highly renowned award, the payment industry also recognizes that YESpay is actively helping North American merchants and POS vendors reduce the burden of costly and lengthy PCI-DSS certification and EMV Chip & PIN accreditation of their multi-channel retail, e-commerce and MOTO payment systems. The YESpay solution allows merchants to certify their retail systems to EMV standards enabling them to fast track the deployment of fully approved POS systems and e-commerce websites.

IZettle mobile payments appointed Hans Dalborg, chairman. Previously CEO and chairman at Nordea Bank, Europe’s eighth largest bank, Dalborg brings with him two decades of experience in the banking sector and lead Nordea Bank AB through a number of mergers with other Nordic banks. He supports a cashless society, exploring ways to reduce the use of cash and focusing on how banks will handle money transactions in the future.

The Conference Board Leading Economic Index for the U.S. was 0.8% in May to 114.7 (2004 = 100) after dropping 0.4% in April and shooting up 0.7% in March. The Coincident Economic Index (CEI) meanwhile was up 0.1% to 102.9 (2004 = 100) after a 0.1% increase in April and a 0.2% increase in March.…

Cardtronics forged definitive agreements to acquire EDC ATM Subsidiary, LLC and Efmark Deployment I for $145 million, plus or minus an adjustment for working capital as of the closing date. Cardtronics will acquire all ownership interests in EDC’s ATM business, including approximately 3,700 ATMs, as well as numerous ATM placement agreements with high-traffic U.S. retailers and ATM branding contracts with some of America’s largest financial institutions. EDC operates nationwide with an ATM placement portfolio focused on multi-state retail operators and high transacting merchant locations, such as convenience stores. After closing, Cardtronics will own and operate 23,500 US ATMs, 14,700 branded ATMs in the US and own, manage and operate over 41,000 machines worldwide.

Relevant Security Corporation achieved PCI-DSS compliance in the configuration of the RS enterprise security appliance product line. A comprehensive analysis was performed on the Relevant Security RS10, RS100 and RS1000 appliances to determine compliance with the PCI-DSS. The RS appliances are designed to provide secure point-to-point and point-to-multipoint communication in the enterprise WAN environment, including transporting cardholder data. The RS appliances provide organizations with a simplified and compliant ability to manage encryption keys for transmission of cardholder data while its use of Real Privacy Management removes most of the challenges of key management for the merchant that have been found in many other end point encryption solutions.

NACHA has become a Forum member with the Interactive Financial eXchange Forum, for which it will be active in the Forum’s Liaison and Interoperability Working Group (LIWG), which was launched this spring as a center of expertise within the Forum for interoperability with external standards and communications with organizations that develop them. The IFX Forum is an international non-profit industry association whose mission is to develop and promote the adoption of its open, interoperable standard for financial data exchange, IFX, which is available at no charge at http://bms.ifxforum.org/.